4.

ALLEGRETTO MISTERIOSO

She climbed into her pod carefully. Intensive exercise had eased her gut some, and she had done her meditation, so a quiet energy now swam in her, through her, lapping like a warm sea.

Still… her heart tripped along like an apprehensive puppy. Heart’s engine, be thou still, she thought, echoing a line she had heard in an Elizabethan song—part of her linguistic background training. Her own thumper ignored her scholarly advice.

She had used this pod in her extensive explorations of the Sagittarius Architecture and was now accustomed to its feel, what the old hands called its “get.” Each pod had to be tailored to the user’s neural conditioning. Hers acted as a delicate neural web of nanoconnections, tapping into her entire body to convey a body-centered feel to fit the simple linear texts.

After the cool contact pads, neuro nets cast like lace across her. In the system warm-ups and double checks, the pod hummed in welcome. Sheets of scented amber warmth washed over her skin. A prickly itch irked across her legs.

A constellation of subtle sensory fusions drew her to a tight nexus—linked, tuned to her body. Alien architectures used most of the available human input landscape, not merely texts. Dizzying surges in the eyes, cutting smells, ringing notes. Translating these was elusive. Compared with the pod, meager sentences were a hobbled, narrow mode. The Library had shown that human speech, with its linear meanings and weakly linked concepts, was simple, utilitarian, and typical of younger minds along the evolutionary path. So Messages could be more like experiences than signals.

The Sigma Structures were formidably dense and strange. Few Librarians had worked on them in this generation, for they had broken several careers, wasted on trying to scale their chilly heights.

Crisply Rachel asked her pod, “Anything new on your analysis?”

The pod’s voice used a calm, mellow woman’s tone, fruit of the ever-improving Artilect tech. “I received the work corpus from the deceased gentleman’s pod. I am running analysis now, though fresh information flow is minor. The Shannon entropy analysis works steadily but hits halting points of ambiguity.”

The Shannon routines looked for associations between signal elements. “How are the conditional probabilities?”

The idea was simple in principle. Given pairs of elements in the Sigma Structures, how commonly did language elements B follow elements A? Such two-element correlations were simple to calculate across the data slabs. Rachel watched the sliding, luminous tables and networks of connection as they sketched out on her surrounding screens. It was like seeing into the architecture of a deep, old labyrinth. Byzantine pathways, arches and towers, lattice networks of meaning.

Then the pod showed even higher-order correlations of three elements. When did Q follow associations of B and A? Arrays skittered all across her screens.

“Pretty dizzying,” Rachel said to her pod. “Let me get oriented. Show me the dolphin language map.”

She had always rather liked these lopsided structures. The screen flickered, and the entropy orders showed as color-coded, tangled links. They looked like buildings built by drunken architects—lurching blue diagonals, unsupported lavender decks, sandy roofs canted against walls. “Dolphins use third- and fourth-order Shannon entropy,” the pod said.